Why Amazon’s Drone Delivery Service Won’t Fly Any Time Soon

Photo: Amazon.com

OK, Amazon won the Cyber Monday news jackpot. Bezos and his merry band announced plans to one day deliver packages with drones, nabbing legions of headlines in the process. Before we get all serious, let’s take a moment to appreciate how awesome it would be to have a UAV touch down in your front yard and drop off your new coffee maker.

The concept isn’t new. Several companies including FedEx and even a vaporware taco delivery business have thrown out the idea of using an unmanned aircraft to deliver products to customers. But Amazon is a bit bigger than a couple of guys talking about delivering munchies to those with a must-have-now craving, and they have produced a nice video showing how their service, called “Prime Air” might work. When Amazon talks, even if it talks a bit crazy, people pay attention.

Today is, of course, Cyber Monday: the busiest shopping day of the year for online retailers. And just as traditional retailers have garnered headlines in past years by opening up earlier and earlier on Black Friday (all the way back to Thursday), it’s no accident that Amazon decided to build a little PR hype the night before Cyber Monday. The question is how much of Amazon’s new “Prime Air” is reality vs. how much is hype?

Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos himself admits the idea of small electric, autonomous octocopters is still several years away from actually being used to deliver packages. Unveiling the idea on CBS 60 Minutes, he told Charlie Rose, “this is years of additional work.”

Indeed as Bezos acknowledged, the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to even write the rules on how unmanned aircraft could be used for commercial use. But by announcing plans to use the aircraft, Amazon likely hopes it will play a significant role in the discussions regarding the new rules. This is after all the company that managed to convince the United States Postal Service to deliver packages on Sundays.

The FAA outlined a plan that would start with the “accomodation” of existing drones on a limited, case-by-case basis as they are today. These would likely include law enforcement and national security use, as well as use in less populated areas. The agency acknowledges the privacy concerns posed by the use of unmanned aircraft. So beyond governmental use, it’s likely their use outside populated areas will expand before use in densely inhabited ones. This means the farmers who are already using them to monitor their crops are probably going to get the green light before you get a 30-minute delivery from Amazon, especially for flights that would be autonomous or beyond visual range of an operator.

Jeff Bezos explained its drones could be used to deliver packages up to 10 miles from its fulfillment centers, with the unmanned octocopter flying autonomously to a GPS coordinate: the customer’s address. This is something that could technically be done today. But some of the biggest hurdles the FAA has laid out for future drone in the “integration” phase of its plan are the basic safety requirements currently required of manned aircraft.

Perhaps first and foremost on this list includes the ability to “sense and avoid” other aircraft, especially those with people on board. There is also the question of building robust enough aircraft so that simple mechanical problems don’t lead to a 100 pound octocopter (and the five pound Amazon box) crashing into a crowd standing below. In the 60 minutes interview, Bezos mentioned wanting to avoid landing on somebody’s head, and that probably means a camera, and cameras open up perhaps the biggest issue of privacy. These aren’t deal breakers for Prime Air, but they do lay out a long–and likely tedious–process of developing the aircraft beyond the simple drones Amazon is showing off in its video.

There is no technical reason drones couldn’t be used to deliver packages. Amazon says it is looking at using the octocopters to deliver packages of five pounds or less within a 10 mile radius of a fulfillment center. That distance and payload might be a bit optimistic for the average consumer type quad- or octocopter, but it’s simply a matter of using the right size vehicle to get that kind of performance. And there’s no doubt that by the time 2015 rolls around and the FAA begins to provide the regulations for unmanned aircraft, the technology and capabilities will have developed much further than what Bezos showed off in the video. But so will the likely response to their use, including the ability to… well… disrupt deliveries.

Some weary of the use of unmanned aircraft have already pledged to shoot them down. It’s less likely somebody would haul out a shotgun in an urban area to shoot down an Amazon delivery. But there are more subtle ways to take down a small electric octocotper, including nets, even “mist nets”–virtually invisible nets used to catch or control birds–that would allow everybody from protesters to simple thieves to stop a delivery. And of course there is probably a hacker or two who would like to tackle the problem.

It would be naive to suggest that one day unmanned aircraft won’t be used as delivery vehicles. There’s even a good argument that passengers might one day fly on airliners without a pilot sitting at the controls. The development curve of unmanned aircraft is rather steep right now, and as is often the case, it is ahead of the regulators. It is also ahead of the public discourse on the idea. There are debates held, but as more ideas like Amazon’s Prime Air are unveiled, it is likely to bring more people into the discussion. The question is whether they will be excited at the possibility their order will be delivered by octocopter, or if they will simply be shopping for a mist net and a copy of 1984 instead.